Good story. But is it digital?
By Scott Rosenberg
"The power to tell story is what separates man from dog."
Read that quotation from Mark "Spoonman" Petrakis' opening presentation
here at the First Annual Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte,
Colorado, and you'll probably have a few questions -- like, why the odd
syntax? Why not say "a story"? And where'd the dog come
in?
I need to tell you more: that Spoonman wears an eyepatch. That he has a
blanket draped over his shoulders with a Raisin Bran box affixed to its
front. That he waves a giant wooden spoon as he talks, in a mock foreign
accent floating somewhere between Siberia and the Mediterranean. That he
is telling an anecdote about the difference between animals, which may play
with stories in their own heads but cannot communicate them, and human beings,
who have always enjoyed gathering around a fire to trade tales.
I paint the scene; I relay an event.The quote makes sense -- it has a place
in the world of a story.
What, though, might make it a "digital" story? In one sense, it
already is one, since you're reading it on the World Wide Web.
As a writer, I can report the story to you second-hand, as I just did. On
the Web, I could just as easily put up a picture of Spoonman.
Any newspaper or magazine could do the same thing. With a little more effort,
I can throw in a digital audio file and let you hear Spoonman's voice. So
now we're mimicking radio. With even more effort I can put up a video of
his story and arrive in the vicinity of TV.
A computer can be an efficient printing press or broadcast device, and these
versions of the Spoonman saga would all technically be "digital stories"
since they're recorded in digital form. As a stage for storytelling, however,
the computer only comes into its own uniqueness as part of a communications
network. The most truly "digital" way I can tell you the Spoonman
story is to send you to Spoonman's
Web site to learn who the character is and what he's all about.
Immediately, then, the definition of "digital story" falls into
two parts:
- a story that happens to be delivered in digital form; or
- a story that can only be told using digital tools.
We shouldn't underestimate the importance of digital distribution of stories,
whether on CD-ROM or more likely across the net. It will change the business
of publishing, the world of entertainment and the nature of community. It
will allow more stories from more places to be told to more people. But
if digital delivery makes something a digital story, then pretty soon all
stories will be digital, and the term will lose any useful meaning. As digital
photography pioneer Pedro Meyer argued at this morning's discussion, we
don't call stories that happen to be delivered on a printed page "ink
stories" -- and calling something that arrives via computer a "digital
story" is just as superficial. The postal service is different, but
the letter remains the same.
Then there are stories that could never have existed until the invention
of computers -- experiments in hypertext fiction, interactive environments
and multimedia narratives. These are undeniably "digital" in nature.
But to what extent do they remain stories?
Such forms are in their infancy. But here are some questions that may help
us figure out whether these experiments can share the label "story"
-- and whether they can fill the important place stories hold in our culture:
Do they have characters with whom we identify? Beginnings, middles, and
ends? Personalities? Playfulness, or beauty, or recognizable truth? Do they
tell us about other people's lives? Do we remember them? Do they change
us?
If the answers are all "no," then whatever it is, it's probably
not a story. And if many of the answers are "yes," then we should
hardly care whether we call it digital.